It had to be a forbidding task to develop a movie of Michael Cunningham's Pulitzer-winning novel, "The Hours." But director Stephen Daldry ("Billy Elliot") was diligent in retaining the triple-tracked structure of the story, which enmeshes the lives of three emotionally troubled women from three different eras, when he reproduced it as a screen drama. Despite its pretensions, "The Hours" is an entangling film about the identity crises that women face in society, and the effects on their intimates, male or female. Daldry benefits from regal actresses Meryl Streep, Julianne Moore and Nicole Kidman as his leads, and top-flight talent, especially Ed Harris, in supporting roles. Restlessly, "The Hours" shifts its attention from clinically depressed author/literary icon Virginia Woolf (Kidman) as she starts to write the novel "Mrs. Dalloway" in the 1920s, to a distraught housewife (Moore) in post-World War II Los Angeles, to a modern, stressed-out Manhattan book editor (Streep). Woolf's novel becomes a touchstone for the other women, as they confront personal demons and pressure from presumed loved ones.